Sunday, April 5, 2009

Silent Hill: The Escape for the iPhone and iPod Touch is the second Konami game for the device I’ve played, and this one is even worse. Like their other effort, this title is simple, boring, repetitive, and short.

The game’s narrative and story-telling are very bland, giving you a sentence or two of inner-monologue after each stage, like, “Where am I?” or “How do I get out of here?” Very telling of what’s actually going on with the “story”, and almost moved me to tears with all that emotion. The same can be said with the graphics, as all the stages feature plain, dark areas, and the only differences between them all are the textures, which doesn’t change the fact that you are walking through a maze. The gameplay isn’t much better.

Each of the 10 stages is a small maze, filled with a bunch of corridors, where you have to find both a key and the exit. The exit is marked on your map, so you know the general direction to go, and the key is someplace else. That’s pretty much it. The first few stages are fairly straight forward, while the later ones get a slightly higher number of corridors to walk through, and add in some fences to block your path. There are also a handful of deadly enemies in the game, like frogs and wheelchairs, plus those hottie nurses. They just walk up to you, and if they touch you, you die and start that stage over. You do have a gun at your disposal to dispatch these menacing figures. The gun’s reticule is stuck in the center of the screen, so to aim, you have to tilt your device to alter the camera, and then tap the reticule to fire off a round. When you do reach the end of a stage, you are rated on accuracy, time, steps taken, and enemies killed. That’s pretty much it.

Once you do beat the game, either in about an hour or never as you’ll be bored after the 2nd stage, but you’ll probably still have hope that something more will come, you learn that the whole “plot” has been set up by some aliens…or something. Anyways, after this, you can replay the game now as an alien, with a special laser gun, but the stages are still the same so there is no real incentive here.

If you haven’t gotten the point by now, then let me just sum it all up: don’t waste your money on this game. It’s short, not scary, stupid, boring, bland, easy, and has almost nothing to do with Silent Hill. You walk through a maze, find a key that isn’t randomly placed, so it’s in the same spot every time, and get to the exit. The enemies are easily killed, except for one which must be maneuvered around in the last couple stages. I’ll at least give them that they added a few more difficult enemies in the last half of the game, with the flying guy who moves all over the place, but easily killed with some practice. The levels are all really the same, and the game is too simple. Move, shoot, move some more. There is no incentive to play.